Forever and Always Read online

  Narcissa’s power was nothing compared to this boy’s. This beautiful child had some specific power in his fingertips. He could…I could almost see it, but then it escaped me. When I looked back at my body I saw it was but a step away from Adam and Bo’s frozen bodies.

  Time, I cried in my mind. Give me more time to figure this out.

  I looked back at the spirit, and he’d changed himself into a man from ancient times, Biblical times. He was walking among people who were crippled and diseased. The spirit was trying to tell me something but I couldn’t understand what.

  In the next instant, my body reached the frozen forms of Adam and Boadicea. I saw myself start to open the box, then, just as I was about to see inside it, the dream ended.

  When I awoke, I had a headache and I was very tired. I wanted to lie in bed all day, eat candy and watch old movies on TV. I wanted my husband to be there and tease me about being lazy, and I wanted the girls to climb into bed with me and get chocolate on the sheets. I wanted to look out the window and see my father and my sister-inlaw holding hands and gazing into each other’s eyes, thinking they were alone in the world, unseen by anyone.

  For a moment I put my hands over my face, breathed deeply and tried to keep from crying. I tried to pretend indifference to Linc’s beauty, to his beautiful skin, to the way the muscles on his body moved under his shirt, but I wasn’t immune to him.

  Last night at dinner, the women guests had done everything they could to get his attention. They’d preened and posed, teased and taunted, while Linc had flirted outrageously. His only concession to playing a gay man was to call a woman “honey” now and then. He was such a stereotype that if he’d been on camera he would have been picketed.

  Turning over in bed, I saw that a piece of paper had been slipped under my door. Probably an eviction notice, I thought, then dragged myself out of bed. I felt awful. I was wearing a teddy that was grimy with dirt and had a tear on the side where I’d caught it on a nail. My hose were one giant run, and my body had a coating of dried sweat. My left arm had a bloody gash from where I’d scraped the metal frame of the window when Linc pulled me up and out of the basement.

  As I walked across the room I could feel eyes watching me, so I knew the cameraman was up and awake. The bedside clock said it was 9:30.

  The paper contained a schedule, my personal busy-every-minute list of where I was to be when. I’d already missed breakfast and an early-morning exercise session. As I tried to flex the stiff, overused muscles of my back, I knew I didn’t need more exercise.

  There was a meditation session in thirty minutes; I wanted to make that one. Maybe if I had time to meditate, I could figure out what was going on here. As I stepped into the shower, I wondered if Linc had been given a schedule and if so, what was on it? Carry in buckets of coal? Scrub the kitchen floor?

  I was still stiff when I pulled on a pink sweatsuit I found hanging in my closet, but I’d loosened up by the time I left my room and went in search of the solarium where the meditation was to be held. I wished I could pop some caffeine pills to stay awake. But I needed all my senses alert because I wanted to quiz each woman to see what she knew about the goings-on in this house. Surely the women knew the séances were about as real as a Scooby-Doo movie. Didn’t they?

  Yawning, I took my place on a mat near the other women, crossed my legs and began to meditate.

  Linc

  Chapter Ten

  I DREAMED I WAS IN BED WITH ALL FOUR OF THE SLAVE girls, their supple bodies all over mine, their hands running over my skin, their lips on my legs, on my neck. One took me in her mouth while another ran her breasts over my face.

  When I awoke I was sweating, unfulfilled, and crazy with lust. Worse, I didn’t know if I wanted to call an exorcist or take a couple of pills and go back to sleep.

  I lay in bed awhile, dozing, remembering, half dreaming. I dreamed of the girls with their copper-colored skin and I dreamed of Darci in her black teddy wriggling backward along the ground, inching her way through the window.

  Somewhere in there, in a state of half consciousness, I began to try to remember things. Isn’t that what that…that creature said I needed to do? I didn’t want to think that I’d seen a ghost. People who saw ghosts ended up in the tabloids and were laughed at. There were some things that enlightened, educated American people knew for facts: There were no ghosts and there were no aliens. Not in real life. If a person who had a college degree met a person who said he’d seen a ghost, immediately the ol’ college degree began to laugh in derision. And classify. People who saw ghosts were put into a lower class, “nonu” as the Mitford sisters called it. “Not upperclass.” Ghosts belonged belowstairs, not in the parlor.

  Okay, so where did that put me? Last night Darci had wondered if I was related to some slave who said, “He’s fine. I want him,” yet I’d grown up in a household that thought bad grammar was worse than homicide.

  But I’d seen a ghost. I’d stood there and seen Darci’s hand pass through the arm of some guy who had a Sean Connery fixation, a man who was chained to a wall. I’m ashamed to say that all I could think of was running away. When an iron fence had appeared in my path I’d wanted to sit down and start blubbering.

  Later, it took all my strength and the courage I had no idea I had to stay in that basement and remove those files. But I knew Darci, little bitty female Darci, would do it if I left, so I couldn’t go. After all, she’d started the whole thing for me, so I couldn’t abandon her, could I?

  As I began to wake up I tried to remember what the man-ghost had said. It was like that old rhyme about “dog won’t beat stick.” One thing had to happen before another could. The ultimate happening was for Darci to find her husband, but first…

  I picked up a piece of paper and a short, stubby pencil off the bedside table—“13 Elms. Reflections” it read at the top. I wrote, one, give the slaves what they want. Two, the slaves will tell you things. Three, find something from God. Four, use the thing from God to find the kid. Five, find Adam Montgomery. And six, Linc must remember.

  Gobbledy-gook. None of it meant anything to me, I thought, but suddenly I sat upright in bed. I hadn’t exactly lied to Darci but I hadn’t told her the whole truth either. I’d said I knew nothing about my ancestors, which was true. I’d never been told anything, but my parents couldn’t very well keep me from knowing their names, could they? My father was born John Aloysius Frazier the Second. Second, as in my grandfather’d had the same name. Once, I’d asked my father who the first John Aloysius Frazier was and I was told, “He was my father.” Just that, nothing else. Further questions I asked were met with glaring silence.

  Because of my father’s refusal to talk about his familial origins I’d formed the idea that they were people I wouldn’t want to know. But then, actors were people my father thought were beneath his notice. Maybe my grandfather was something that my father wouldn’t like, say, a descendant of slaves and proud of it. I’d always had the impression my father thought he sprang from Zeus’s loins. Slaves in chains would have marred his image of himself.

  I dressed quickly, then went outside to look for transportation into town. I remembered the way our cabdriver had nearly run from this hideous old brick house so I wanted to find out what the townspeople knew. I saw a woman driving a pickup and asked if I could bum a ride.

  “Sure,” she said,“hop on.”

  It took me a whole thirty seconds to realize she meant for me to climb into the back with the boxes of produce. Her big black dog was taking up the passenger’s seat. Sighing, I got into the back with the cabbages and thought about how I’d tell my agent about this and make him laugh, but then I remembered that Barney was dead because of me.

  When I returned from town hours later, I saw Darci straggling behind the other women as they did a slow, lazy walk through one of the gardens. She was deep into conversation with one of the guests, listening so intently that I wasn’t sure she’d see me hiding in the bushes.

  She did, and ye